Is Your Agent a Practitioner or a Rockstar?

Most insurance agents and investment salespeople are taught that the secret to success

But despite the flaunting, which admittedly reels some people in, I’ve discovered that most people still appreciate a guy (or gal) who cares more about how well he can implement a plan than what shoes he wears.

I Shake Hands and Kiss Babies

Many agents are taught to delegate. Maybe it’s the influence all the useless MBA’s at the Home Office have on the field force as they cling onto the one thing they learned in business school that they actually enjoyed learning: how to get paid to do nothing.

Whatever it is, many agents think that they have arrived when they reach a point where they have enough money to hire people to do all of those mundane tasks that they don’t like doing (pretty much everything that doesn’t include eating and golfing…they call them business meals for a reason).

I’ve literally meant agents who feel that their role within their “team” is to shake hands and kiss babies. In their eyes, their job is to show up, smile, and collect a paycheck. Everything else comes together through the work of his or her “amazing team.” A-M-A-Z-I-N-G indeed.

In fact, I still laugh at those who marvel at the fact that I answer the emails that come in through the contact form on the Insurance Pro Blog.

I don’t Build ‘em I just Fly ‘em!

One of the biggest reasons I don’t like the line of thought that I’ve outlined thus far is that it plays too well into the “I don’t know how it works, but trust me it’s a good idea” business that a lot of agents think is good enough. The types who say something along the lines of, “how does this whole life policy work? Look I don’t know how my car works, but it gets me from point A to point B and that’s all that matters.” (insert uncomfortable squirm here).

A lot of agents who want to live the rockstar life can’t even be bothered to sit down and design the actual life insurance policies they wish to pitch, nope turns out you can pay someone $35,000 per year to do a really bad job at that.

Knowing the products and how they work, and designing them myself has brought an incredible amount of business my way.

Marketing will always be Important, but don’t forget your Job

I’m not saying we, as agents/brokers, can’t partake in various marketing efforts to expand the word of what we do. I do, after all, own the Insurance Pro Blog and co-host a podcast on finance/insurance. But everything you see here is handled pretty directly by either Brantley or me. When someone wants to give us money we’re very intimately involved in the process. Yes our lives would be easier if we shopped a lot of it out, but we’re supposed to be the practitioners, and people come to me with the expectation that I’m going to be putting a plan together for them.

Does it slow us down from time to time? It does indeed. But does you also mean that when someone wants to discuss specifics regarding their potential policy or current policy we talk to them and then we put it together? You bet.

To my fellow agents/brokers out there I’m telling, master your craft. If you do, you won’t just be pretending to live the dream, you’ll actually be able to do it. There’s not a problem that you’ll face in life that can’t be fixed with a little bit of hard work

Brandon launched the Insurance Pro Blog in July of 2011 as a project to de-mystify the life insurance industry. Brandon was born in Northern New England, and he currently calls VT home. He attended Syracuse University and graduated with a triple major in Economics, Public Administration, and Political Science.